This invention relates to railway vehicles and particularly to running gear therefor, and is applicable not only to railway vehicles in which the vehicle body is supported on trucks or bogies, but also where the vehicle body is supported directly on wheel-sets, e.g. four-wheeled vehicles, and where a combination of bogies and wheel-sets may be used to support the body. The invention is also applicable to railway vehicles which are articulated together and where adjacent ends of two vehicles are carried on a single common bogie.
Existing designs of running gear for railway vehicles depend for their riding ability on the provision of stiffness and frictional or viscous restraint between the vehicle body and the wheel sets. Consequently because these parameters inhibit relative movement of the vehicle body and wheel-sets, high stability performance is obtained at the cost of an inferior performance in negotiating curves in the railway track.
In order to provide for good stabilization of a vehicle at high speed, while permitting relatively free movement of the vehicle through curves in the railway track, an arrangement has been proposed for railway vehicle running gear of the kind having side frames, a bolster and at least two wheel-sets, each wheel-set being a live axle mounted in a respective pair of axle bearings, wherein at least one axle bearing of one wheel-set is elastically interconnected with at least one axle bearing of the other wheel-set through bracing means which serve no vertical load carrying function at least intermediate their connections to the axle bearings, said bracing means providing bracing between the wheel-sets which produces high restoring forces when the wheel-sets have a parallel but misaligned disposition, and low restoring forces when the wheel-sets have an aligned but non-parallel disposition.
Such an arrangement has been described and claimed in Wickens U.S. Pat. No. 3,528,374 issued Sept. 15, 1970 for "Railway Truck Resiliently Interconnected Axle Boxes". An object of this invention is to provide an advantageous construction of such an arrangement as well as various other improvements.